How to gorge on your creative leftovers
It's messy, but that's the joy of picking over your creative work.
Don’t like to read? Allow me to read it to you 👈
Dine over the sink of your work.
Have at it.
Do not delay.
Move that spout to the side and get to work.
No one is watching.
You are not being judged.
This is YOUR sink.
These are YOUR idea scraps.
This is YOUR mess. That’s why sink eating is great. Indulgent. Delectable.
Dining over the sink of your work is the best.
Lost?
This is your first sink feast, so I get it. Your first question is probably “What?” and your second, once you’ve understood the what, is “Why?”
For ease of explanation, let’s stay in the kitchen.
Think of your brain as a fridge. Your brain fridge has many shelves. A crisper. A butter drawer. A place for condiments and weirdly shaped bottles in the door. That’s just the architecture. Poised like cheeky gargoyles upon that architecture are many ideas. Some are raw and fresh—you just got them from the market and haven’t even rinsed them yet. They are waiting to be turned into something by you. No pressure. Others have already been socialized and thrown into bowls and baked in ovens and turned into tasty meals. These are the ghosts of ideas past. The odors of thought gone by.
AKA, the leftovers.
These are prime sink foods.
Good or bad, you still have them in your brain fridge. An incredible feast that everyone raved about and you know will taste even better the next day? It’s in there. A half-baked idea you thought could’ve been more if only you’d spent a little more time on it? Right there, behind the maraschino cherries. That magical, aesthetically pleasing thing that didn’t turn out exactly right but you couldn’t bear to hoik it in the bin? There in that Tupperware, ready to be consumed.
The sink is calling and you must go.
Go stand in front of that fridge, open the door, stare into the leftovers’ abyss, and pick one. Take it to the sink and dig in. If there’s any juice left in those bones, any flavor, any potential for a new recipe, you’re gonna find it when you dine over the sink of your work.
We haven’t talked about the why. Let’s talk about the why.
No Menu
There is no set menu for sink dining. No elaborate courses. No platings. No seating times. Whatever leftovers are in season is what you’re eating. Only sustainable sink foods here! Having no menu leaves you free to graze in the fridge of your output, door wide open, warmed by the light of your own spark as you pick and choose your sink dining companion. No reservations. Got it?
Instant Yelp
When you dine over the sink of your work, gorging on your delicious (or suspicious) leftovers, you get instant feedback. Oh, that flavor profile was good. I wonder what other directions I could take that? Hmm, these ingredients weren’t dancing well together, perhaps if I added some spice? By analyzing past meals, you get straight to the yelp of it. Either a yelp of joy that you’ve found a good recipe that can be added to or enhanced, or the Yelp 1-and-done star, do not make again review.
No Miss Manners
You will never be called out for elbows on the table here because there is no table. Napkins? Don’t need ‘em. Take your hat off? No way. The etiquette of sink dining is easy—there is no etiquette. It doesn’t matter what you’re wearing. It doesn’t matter if you burp loudly and vigorously at the sink because no one will call you on it. The only thing you should do is wash your hands before the gluttony. Not because of etiquette rules, but because of my next why.
The Best Tools are Hand Tools
Literally. No etiquette means no cutlery, no table settings, and no specific forks for specific courses. Just hands. Digits and dexterity. Nothing between you and your ideas. Nothing. Dig your hands into that container and get your fingers into the good parts. Rip apart those delicious morsels with gusto and bravado and feel it all. Snap the bones and suck out the marrow. Gooey is good. Get in it up to your elbows.
Your hands are your radar for finding friends or foes. Good? Just the right amount of oil? Bad? Spoiled? Left in this container too long and should be thrown away? Your hands are your best critics to hold up your own product to the light of your reflection and analyze effectiveness. To be absorbed back into you or discarded forever. Judge your work’s taste. Be honest. Your hands are connected and visceral beings, which is why they should be clean to start.
Eat Like a Toddler
When you dine over the sink of your work, you can get good and messy. It’s just you and the sink in this relationship. You and the sink and the greasy fingers and the chin juice and the shirt debris that’s flung your way as you rip apart a roasted idea with your radar hands in your search for a potential thematic purpose.
When you dine over the sink of your work, you can dribble and gurgle and burp and fling. You can make a mess like a two-year-old pro. You can stick your whole hand in your mouth to suck the juices of your endeavors and, dear reader, as you glance up from the sink and catch your reflection in the kitchen window, you will not be alarmed.
No one is here. It’s just you. You are not being judged for this chaos as you examine your work. Ugly eat. Please. Go hog wild in the slop of it.
This is called process. Dining over the sink of your work is now just part of yours.
Crumbs and Maulings
Sinks catch all the crumbs, you get all the flavor. As you gorge yourself like a starved animal upon your own work, it’s only natural that in this frenzy some crumbs will fall from your gob and collect in the sink beneath you.
Before you turn on the tap and wash them away, take one last, loving look.
You unpacked your brain, devoured the contents, and reabsorbed the good stuff. These are the crumbs of your labor. Acknowledge their sacrifice. Decide if you have a three-second rule1 at your sink and then do what must be done. Turn on the tap and flick the switch of your garbage disposal unit. Wash away the mistakes, failures, or “mehs” and never think of them again. No more “perhaps there was something in that?” There wasn’t. You did your due diligence during your sink feast and experienced all the flavor that was to be had. Extraction complete. These are the husks. The shells. Drop them down the sinkhole and listen as they rip and RIP to their final garbage disposal death.
Dining over the sink of your work is like self-therapy. It helps to sort through thought and identify what’s important to give you focus.
And garbage disposals are fun.
Who Doesn’t Want to Be a Cow?
Cows have four stomachs. We have one. Guess what? Now you have one plus this sink. When you dine over the sink of your work, you are more cow-like in processing ideas and analyzing your creative nutrition. You ruminate. You chew thoughtfully as you gaze out the window at the squirrels frolicking in your field of dreams. You digest and process with the purposeful nothingness of time. A second sink is a second think. Glorious. Who doesn’t love time to think?
Be more like a cow. And a toddler. Be a toddler cow. Which is a calf, I guess. My god, you’re so cute at that sink right now!
To summarize.
Your sink is calling. I can hear it from here.
Get to your brain fridge and pick out your leftovers. No point keeping the coulda-beens and the once was-es in the fridge forever. They’ll just go off and stink up the future. Join the Society of Over-the-Work-Sink Eaters (not Sinkies, that’s an ACTUAL thing) and chow down on your good self. Learn and extract all you can from the experience of past projects, if you can. And dining over the sink of your work is the perfect place to do it.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
This week’s amends…
“There was a Monty Python sketch that showed Thomas Hardy writing in front of a live audience, and when he’d finish a sentence, they’d all cheer. Then he’d cross out a sentence, and they’d all boo or sigh. That’s about as exciting a life as it is for a writer: You write sentences, and you cross out sentences.”
-Paul Auster, from aGoodreads interview
On Rotation: “Cattle and Cane” by The Go-Betweens
“Three seconds of animation involving a ball, pass it on to someone from another country, they continue the animation.”
Via Colossal
No-knead Gatorade Bread. The thing no one asked for, and yet here it is in all its glory! Read about how it came to life (and how it worked and tasted) here
Did any of this spark a tiny thought of your own?
If you are a three-second rule kinda person, along with clean hands, a clean sink is also a good idea.